How to Filter out Bots and Spiders from Google Analytics

A common misconception is that Google Analytics or any other JavaScript based Web Analytics solution filters out Spiders and Bots automatically. This was true till few years ago because most of the spiders and bots were not capable of executing JavaScript and hence were never captured by JavaScript based Web Analytics solutions. As shown in 4 reasons why your bounce rate might be wrong, these days bots and spiders can execute JavaScript and hence are showing up in your Web Analytics reports.

Google Analytics has released a new feature that will let you filter out known spiders and bots. Here are few things to keep in mind

The data will only filter spiders and bots from the day you enable this setting. It won’t be allied to the data already processed.

Since this will filter out bots, you might notice a drop in your visits, page views etc.

Here are the steps to filter out Spiders and Bots

Go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics report

Click “View” section and choose the right report view

Click on “ View Settings” (see image 1 below)

Check the box under “Bot Filtering” which says “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” (see image 2 below)